Pretty Young Thing documents an unnamed young woman’s life in a book of hours “slit like an electric cord, splintered, and fused to the pavement,” in a voice that is by turns frank, demure, sweet, sultry, determined, passive, angry, and resigned. Constructed as a sequence of mostly untitled poems, the fractured narrative of this innovative debut traces the physical, historical, and emotional terrain of female sexuality in lyric monologues both interior and dramatic. With these darkly powerful poems, Danielle Pafunda flips the notion of feminine innocence on its back, showing it’s not as pure as people imagine.
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